➡️ Can you be a haddock platform engineer?

Engineers at haddock are action-oriented, curious, autonomous, and take full ownership of their work.

They are champions of figuring out the unknowns. They talk to customers, deliver quality work, improve our tooling, and are ambitious. We look for people with these same motivations and ways of working.

We strongly adhere to the Lean Startup and Agile principles, favoring action over analysis, imperfect iteration over perfect delivery, face-to-face communication, and a fast-paced environment.

We work on initiatives in small mission-oriented squads of 1 to 3 people.

As Senior Platform Engineer, you'll be an embedded individual contributor within the engineering team. You won't lead people, but you will lead technical initiatives that touch every engineer at haddock. You're expected to be opinionated, pragmatic, and to contribute code. This is not an ops-only role.

haddock is an AI-first company, and so is this role. More than 50% of our infrastructure cost today is tied to AI workloads, not traditional SaaS software operations. You'll own both worlds: classic platform work and the cost, performance and reliability of our AI stack. You'll also use AI daily to do your own work, from infra automation, to debugging, to writing code.

Your work cuts across the stack to make the whole team faster and safer:

• Secure our data layer (VPC, DNS, secrets, IAM)

• Improve CI/CD and developer productivity

• Make infra observable: clear, actionable metrics and dashboards, including AI workload cost and performance

• Own cloud cost: visibility, predictability, optimization, with a sharp focus on our AI spend

• Help us scale performance: PostgreSQL optimization, caches, queues, pub/sub, and search/analytics infra (Elasticsearch, BigQuery, ClickHouse…) when the product calls for it

• Architect what comes next: on-call, team growth, next layer of scale

Our processes and tools are constantly improving, and everyone contributes to making them better.

Keep-the-lights-on work is shared, like bug fixing, monitoring and dependency management. We succeed at this by having a rotating squad of Defenders that tackles this kind of maintenance work.

➡️ Example work

Some example high-level objectives that you could work towards in your first months are:

• Moving our PostgreSQL and MongoDB databases behind a VPC with no downtime, and tightening secrets management and IAM along the way.

• Getting AI infra cost and performance under control: instrumenting our AI workflows, identifying waste, and making our AI spend predictable as we scale.

• Improving CI/CD and preview environments so product engineers (and AI agents doing the work) ship faster with less friction.

• Fixing our top performance bottlenecks: identifying the queries and endpoints that hurt most, fixing them, and mentoring the team so good query patterns become the default.

• Leading the decision on whether to adopt Elasticsearch, BigQuery, ClickHouse or similar, backed by data from real product needs.

➡️ Why join now?

If you’re excited by ownership, autonomy, and building technology that directly impacts real businesses every day, this is the right moment to join.

Come on board while we're still a startup. It's much more fun and motivating than joining an already established scale up or corporation where your role is very defined and limited!

This is the first platform role at haddock. You won't be slotting into an existing team with inherited standards, you'll be setting them. If you've been inside a scale-up platform team and want to be the one implanting those practices in a smaller, faster environment, this is for you.

It will be more than a job. It’s a chance to leave your mark on an industry that’s ripe for transformation. Our best perk is our work environment and the opportunities you'll get to learn and grow at haddock.

➡️ Requirements

👉 6+ years of engineering experience, with time spent inside a platform, infrastructure or SRE team at a scale-up operating real production systems. You're an individual contributor who's seen how it's done well and wants to be the one setting the bar in a smaller, faster environment.

👉 Accomplished in cloud and platform: hands-on with cloud infra, VPCs, networking, IAM and secrets. You've improved CI/CD and developer productivity in a growing team.

👉 Performance and scale at the data layer: you've fought DB performance for real, reading EXPLAIN ANALYZE, designing indexes, solving partitioning, etc. You've worked with caches, queues or pub/sub in prod, and have used at least one search or analytics tool at scale (Elasticsearch, BigQuery, ClickHouse or similar).

👉 AI-native way of working. You already use AI daily, with good judgement and real productivity. You're excited that 50%+ of our infra cost is AI and want to own that. Candidates who don't embrace AI are not a fit.

👉 You write clean code and can contribute to the product monorepo. You're not ops-only.

👉 Fluent in Spanish and comfortable in English. We tend to speak in Spanish at the office and in Slack, and write documentation and projects in English.

➡️ What is haddock?

haddock is the market leader solution for point of control in restaurants, handling all back-office vital operations like product management, inventories, purchases, price tracking, document conciliation, bank conciliation, paychecks, clocking in/out, P&L reports, etc.

Not only we have a system of record that helps operate restaurants with control and clarity, but we're also the leaders in offering AI Agents, starting with Fina. They work 24/7 doing the heavy, tedious work that our customers don't have time to do well.

This is no AI hype. Our customers obtain visible value from our AI Agents, both in money and time saved. We're becoming strategic partners in the design of their businesses.

👉 Our mission is to empower millions of restaurateurs to level up their business.

👉 Our vision is to lead the market through innovation, strong relationships and by becoming the go-to tech partner for restaurant success.

👀 haddock is backed by Y Combinator, the accelerator behind Airbnb and Twitch. We're growing fast with support from top-tier investors like JME, Decelera, Extension Fund, Wayra, and Zone2Boost.

▶️ Learn about our business and story on Itnig, Por qué el 90% de los restaurantes fracasa en menos de 2 años.

Bonus: we're a step away from the people using what we build. Many of our restaurants are based right here in Barcelona, and they love haddock.

➡️ What we offer?

• 💸 A competitive salary (€50–60k gross/year), that will increase as haddock and you grow.

• 🏢 A bright modern office in Barcelona, in Poblenou. Probably the best office you've ever worked at.

• ☯️ Hybrid work, with 2 days at the office to build trust, collaborate, align and get creative.

• 🪄 All AI tooling that you wish to experiment with.

• 🧘 A subsidized Urban Sports Club membership: yoga, HIIT, hot studios...

• 💰 Enjoy benefits when spending part of your salary, thanks to Playflow. 

➡️ Our Hiring Process

We move fast and communicate openly. Our goal is to wrap up the process within a week. Here's what to expect:

1. Intro call with Guillermo (Head of Technology), 25 mins.

2. Call with Pol (co-founder, CEO), 25 mins.

3. Technical interviews with Guillermo and another engineer (2 hours). Part 1: deep dive into a past infra/performance problem you've solved end-to-end. Part 2: system design on a concrete haddock scenario.

Sounds like an opportunity? Apply now. We’d love to meet you.

💬 We answer all applications that include a personalized message or cover letter.